Harvey Dubner (1928–2019) was an electrical engineer and
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
who lived in
New Jersey
New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...
, noted for his contributions to finding large
prime number
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a Product (mathematics), product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime ...
s. In 1984, he and his son Robert collaborated in developing the 'Dubner cruncher', a board which used a commercial
finite impulse response filter chip to speed up dramatically the multiplication of medium-sized
multi-precision numbers, to levels competitive with supercomputers of the time, though his focus later changed to efficient implementation of
FFT-based algorithms on personal computers.
He found many large prime numbers of special forms:
repunit
In recreational mathematics, a repunit is a number like 11, 111, or 1111 that contains only the digit 1 — a more specific type of repdigit. The term stands for "repeated unit" and was coined in 1966 by Albert H. Beiler in his book ''Recr ...
s,
Fibonacci primes, prime
Lucas numbers,
twin primes,
Sophie Germain prime
In number theory, a prime number ''p'' is a if 2''p'' + 1 is also prime. The number 2''p'' + 1 associated with a Sophie Germain prime is called a . For example, 11 is a Sophie Germain prime and 2 × 11 +&nbs ...
s,
Belphegor's prime, and
primes in arithmetic progression. In 1993 he was responsible for more than half the known primes of more than two thousand digits.
He originated Dubner's conjecture, which proposes that all even numbers greater than 4208 are the sum of two prime numbers that have a twin.
Dubner died on October 23, 2019.
References
External links
an incomplete list of Dubner's publications
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dubner, Harvey
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
1928 births
2019 deaths